Jackson Free Press

I'm sitting in my modest but comfortable Fondren home on a Saturday night, nursing a summer cold. My power is finally back on; my AC, television and Internet are working, and my car even has some gas! My wife and I are expecting our first child any minute now, and I feel fairly confident that we'll be able to bring him into this world with some semblance of safety. And although I am grateful for all of this (except the cold), I am also extremely angry, almost to the point of despair.

People throughout the world share this anger. New Orleans, perhaps America's most beloved and unique city, is gone. The beautiful Gulf Coast of Mississippi is destroyed. Not damaged, not dirty … destroyed. The poor (and yes, in the vast majority of cases, black) were left to drown and starve and fend for themselves against what the Army's own newspaper calls "the insurgency in the city." Some of America's most special places have vanished in the water, and with them has gone our national dignity. For in our greatest time of need, our government simply abandoned us.

The day after Hurricane Katrina hit, George W. Bush, our American Nero, felt it was more important to speak at a California fund raiser and photo opportunity, where he could sing the same tired and discredited song about the war in Iraq, than to show some leadership in response to a massive disaster. Condoleeza Rice was found shopping for expensive shoes to wear to "Spam-a-Lot" on Broadway, apparently oblivious to the apocalyptic destruction in the part of the country she once called home. Dick Cheney was last reported seen in Wyoming, vacationing as far away from the floodwaters as he was from the growing political storm in Washington.

The social Darwinism of this "faith-based" administration is well known to anyone who cares to see it clearly; Katrina merely cast that appalling lack of empathy into sharper and starker relief than ever before. Michael Chertoff, the hapless head of the Department of Homeland Security, made reference to the thousands of people who "chose" not to evacuate, as if they were merely trying to conserve gasoline in their SUVs. (Chertoff's statement, I should add, was repeated nearly verbatim on a local right-wing blog, by someone who should have known better. Lack of charity apparently begins at home.)

In a perfect demonstration of BushCo.'s detachment from reality, Chertoff insisted that he had "not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and water"—something anyone with a television and a strong constitution could easily refute. He pitifully claimed that the storm "exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight."

In this, Chertoff mimicked his boss, George W. Bush, who told Diane Sawyer: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." This is nonsense—no surprise from an administration that has trafficked in deceit and Orwellian misdirection from the get-go. Warnings about New Orleans' vulnerability to a biblical catastrophe like Katrina, backed by extensive science and accompanied by pleas for federal assistance, have been coming for years.

When I was in Lithuania in March, I picked up and read an article from the October 2004 issue of National Geographic. This article precisely detailed a hypothetical disaster scenario that could have been plucked from last week's papers. An August hurricane. More than a million people evacuated to higher ground but hundreds of thousands remaining, out of poverty or, in some cases, stubbornness. A storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain, forcing levees to give way. Thousands drowned in waters contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more dead from dehydration and disease while they waited in vain for rescuers.

The article concludes with the end tally of this then-only-imagined nightmare:

"It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

"When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City."

What does all this mean? It means that somewhere, in the deepest recesses of Eastern Europe, there are subscribers to American magazines who more clearly understood the threat to New Orleans than did George W. Bush and his cronies (if you believe their excuses).

It also means that the Bush administration, in addition to possibly criminal negligence in the days immediately before and after the storm, is also guilty of being an accessory well before the fact. Massive Bush budget cuts forced the end of new levee improvements and constructions that might have had a chance of limiting the lion's share of the storm surge in New Orleans, or would at least have made it easier to pump out the floodwaters afterward. Even more significantly, Bush subsumed FEMA into the bureaucracy of Homeland Security, slashed its resources and morale, and entrusted its leadership to amiable campaign donors with zero experience in emergency management. Current FEMA chief Michael Brown's last job? He ran horse shows, and he was fired.

While Bush is not the only president responsible for this appalling lack of foresight (both Clinton and Carter targeted flood-control projects for cuts, for example), it's the overall context that matters.

Walter Maestri, the emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune over a year ago: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

It's true, no one in New Orleans is happy. Not now, as some small seeds of relief come to this once-magical city many days too late. Spirits aren't too high in Mississippi, either, as storm victims wonder when help will arrive … while an aimless, misguided, misbegotten war that continues to spiral out of control diverts vital resources from the real dangers and other challenges in our very midst.

No, there is absolutely no joy in Floodville, and it is our national honor that has struck out. And for that, someone must be held accountable. Who will that be? I have a suggestion.

Scott Albert Johnson is a musician and writer in Jackson.